Where is Pawlenty coming from? and where is he going?

BY DAVE PORTER

Our perpetually potential presidential candidate, Tim Pawlenty, just cannot
keep his eyes off the prize.  The Republican presidential nomination in 2012 has him hypnotized.  Meanwhile, he disregards the needs and standards of the people of Minnesota.  The educational system that provided him with a decent education; the safe roads and bridges he needed to get from South St. Paul to the Capitol; the public health and safety systems that enabled his mother to raise his family — none of these have any value to him now that he has received their benefits. 

He is a nice guy.  Goes to church regular, married, still plays a little hockey.  But he’d rather see 37,000 poor Minn-esotans go without health care before he’d give up on a tax break for 500 rich ones.  He even threatened to shut down our state’s legal system until his most recent appointee to the state Supreme Court—and a former law partner—made him back down.

It has been clear for some time that Pawlenty favors the rich over the poor.  What has not been clear is just who benefits from this bizarre refusal to bring taxes in line with the necessary minimum expenditures needed to keep our government’s necessary functions operational.  Who is he catering to, anyway?  Most everyone pays either income taxes or property taxes, or both.  When one goes down the other goes up.  For almost everyone.

In one of those “thinking while shaving” moments, I think I figured it out.  “Qui bono?” I asked.  Who benefits from shifting taxation from income taxes to property taxes?  Who gets by without having to pay taxes on real estate? 

There is really only one answer: big churches.  They are exempt from property taxes.  And their pastors have big-league incomes.

The most under-reported story in Minnesota has been Tim Pawlenty’s devoted membership in the radical rightwing evangelical protestant Wood-dale Baptist Church out in Eden Prairie. His pastor, Leith Anderson, is also the chairman of the National Association of Evangelicals, a very active and politically potent collection of 45,000 American churches.  You’ve heard of them, even if you don’t remember who Ted Haggard was.  And Ted was on the phone every morning with young Mr. Bush during the first six years of W’s calamitous presidency.

Pawlenty is simply Bush Jr. revisited.  Cater to the evangelicals, act nice, talk a lot about being a compassionate conservative, and work up from your 25 percent base.  All you need is another 26 percent, and you can run the place any way you want.  Here’s how to do it:

a) Promise to lower income taxes for their enormously overpaid pastors and major contributors (remember—$100 to your church only saves the average individual $10 in taxes; if you’re rich, that same hundred dollars will save you 35 or 40);

b) Get those “Faith-based Initiative” tax dollars for big-church social programs that employ their relatives and friends and church members; and
c) Quietly continue the program of freedom from property taxes for all that valuable church property.  Churches, bible camps, private schools and more—they pay no property taxes, but get all the benefits that their surrounding communities buy for them.

This program is expensive only for the rest of us.  And falling bridges make you pray every time you cross one, hoping it will stay up until you get to the other side.  A failing Public Health System, first put in place after the great Flu Epidemics of 1918-20 now give everyone all the more reason to fear and hate the poor.  A lousy education for our kids, with no civics, history or sense of what it takes to make a democracy work makes it easier for Republicans to scare everyone into submission. 
Pawlenty’s underlying disregard for the future of our republic seems to tie in with the notion that we will all be either swept up to heaven or Left Behind real soon during the coming apocalyptic End Times anyway.

How do we deal with all this self-centered narcissism? Chri-stian fundamentalism, like all fundamentalist movements, invariably perceives itself as responding to unfair attacks.  The medieval Crusaders in-spired themselves with the same thinking.  The curse of the Serbs is their never-ending conviction that they are the unappreciated Guardians of the Gates of Europe against the evil forces of Islam.  The other over-riding characteristic is the need to continually purify their own ranks. 

The Republican Party has so thoroughly merged itself with Christian Fundamentalists that it no longer has room for any Republicans.  Drink the Kool-Aid or leave the room.  Mean-while, accuse everyone else of precisely what you are doing yourself.  Assign moral failure to anyone asking for any little bit of money from the government for health care—but only after you’ve gotten trillions for yourself.

As I write this, Governor Pawlenty is using an emergency power—granted by the Legisl-ature to keep the state’s government from collapsing in the event a budget could not be agreed upon—in whatever ways he sees fit.  This authority made sense when we had people like Arne Carlson or Jesse Ventura in the office.  Say what you will about style or personality, they took the job seriously and they understood and obeyed the Constitution. 

We now have as our Gover-nor a self-certain fundamentalist who answers only to his own private Higher Power, someone with his eyes on another goal entirely. Someone who really does not care if people have to fight each other over the scraps left in the ditch by the rich.

Good luck to us all.  Let us each pray if we need to.  But for sure, let us work together to get through this.